Human rights have done nothing to defend our freedoms
by Luke Gittos, spiked:
The UK has become a more illiberal place since the Human Rights Act was passed.
The UK government has published legislation which will abolish the Human Rights Act and introduce a new British Bill of Rights. It follows a controversial intervention by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg last week, which effectively prevented the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, scuppering one of the key planks in the government’s migration policy. The Ministry of Justice says that its plan ‘will set British courts free from the obligation to follow case law from the Strasbourg court in every circumstance’ and will ‘make it clear that the UK’s own Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter on human-rights issues’.
Predictably, the reaction to this has been hysterical. One commentator claims that in scrapping the Human Rights Act the Ministry of Justice ‘has taken a hatchet to the single most powerful rights tool this country has ever had’. Other critics have branded the plan to scrap the Human Rights Act as ‘racist’.
Supporters of the Human Rights Act believe that it is responsible for maintaining our freedom from tyranny. They claim that, without it, we would be subject to the arbitrary whims of an authoritarian government.
Read also: There’s no such thing as Human Rights by Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday
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